Nas2EndWork "Pamela's Blogs":
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Blog 1: "You Know How I Know You're a Slave?"
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Blog 2: "Where the Hell is Vasquez When We Really Need Her?"
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Blog 3: "How Do I Con Thee? Let Me Count the Ways...Or: What Is 'Individual Freedom'?"
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Blog 4: "Is It Never Too Late to Be the Parent I Should Have Been?"
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Blog 5: "Are We Innocent When We Dream?"
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Blog 6: "To Enlarge the Realm of the Possible"
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Blog 7: "Bury the Corpse!"
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Blog 8: "Just Say NO! Make Coke the First Corpse to Go!"
Blog 9: "Compassion Always Comes Too Late"
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Blog 10: "To Live and Die a Slave?"
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Blog 11: "Crime Is The Flip Side"
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Blog 12: "Rocket Science Ain't Rocket Science"
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Blog 13: "The Fuck-It Factor"
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Blog 14: "How Do You Organize (Our World) Without Hierarchy?"
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Blog 15: "Eating What The Earth Gives Me"
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Blog 16: "When You Become A Voice Of The Voiceless"
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Blog 17: "You Got To Sucker The Corn Or the Ears Won't Be Worth Nothin'"
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Blog 18: "Packaging Our Children For The Podrunks"
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Blog 19: "The Good Livers"
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Blog 20: "Is There Such A Thing As "Voicelessness"?"
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Blog 21: "Brandon Terrell Jones"
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Blog 22: "Our Real Work"
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Blog 23: "Gennenice Chapman Johnson"
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Blog 24: "What Is Your 'Theory of Change'?"
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Blog 25: "The Plum Tree"
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Blog 26: "Wholism Is A Health Issue"
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Blog 27: "Who's Loving You Michael?"
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Blog 28: "Getting Busy"
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Blog 29: "Depopulation"
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Blog 30: "Growing A Mass Movement"
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Blog 31: "Ridley's Choice"
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Blog 32: "Children Of The Technology"
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Blog 33: "The Devastated Earthscapes From Lawrence Summers' "Logic""
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Blog 34: "How Do We Grow A Mass Movement?"
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Blog 35: "We Have To Make A Loud Noise"
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Blog 36: "The Phoenix"
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Blog 37: "Wind-Blown Seeds Need Roots"
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Blog 38: "Embracing The Plural"
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Blog 39: "Round And Round And Round We Go But Not Merrily"
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Blog 40: "Unplugging"
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Blog 41: "Thank You Sandy From Petaluma"
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Blog 42: "You Got City Hands Mr. Hooper"
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Blog 43: "Letter to Michael Reynolds"
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Blog 44: "The Last Civil Rights Movement"
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Blog 45: "The 4 R's: The Ruses Used To Rend Us...Race, Religion, Reason, and Recognition - 1"
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Blog 46: "The 4 Ruses - 2"
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Blog 47: "The 4 Ruses - 3"
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Blog 48: "The Responsibility Of The Intellectual"
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Blog 49: "The Hidden Malevolence: AKA Michael Moore's Dilemma"
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Blog 50: "Wading Into The Muck Of State"
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Blog 51: "Seeing The Communal Alternative"
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Blog 52: "Becoming The Function"
Pamela's Blog 47
[In Progress] 1st draft – Sunday, September 27, 2009, 2nd draft begun Thursday, February 4, 2010 by Nas2EndWork.org
“The 4 Ruses Used To Rend Us...Race, Religion, Reason and Recognition – 3”
And: ** ...consider the possibility that souls are made of poetry.... (Discussion continued from: The Responsibility Of 'The Intellectual')
by Pamela Satterwhite
In the midst of Death wings stubborn Life, the wild within the tamed.
My mornings usually include communion with the gulls and crows. They've staked their claim to a space in the midst of urban containment, adjacent to people who congregate for coffee and various forms of non-nature-worship.
This morning I noticed the gulls were gone and the crows in livid communication. There, perched on the fence near the Bedroom Vehicle, was a hawk. I couldn't help myself, I gawked. The crows, less impressed, left in outrage...or probably just circumspection.
Standing in awe while the crows got gone I thought...how much more rightful this study of Life (which we once knew) than that study of Death they limit us to...
...and without it...without this 'study of Life,' who are we?... what are we?...
...if not empty husks left serving a system that's destroying us...
...and the planet...
...and other living things...
– with our authentic 'Self' in hiding.
We should never forget that the word "commodity" means "counterfeit countenance"...a.k.a., "false face"...
...and that our lives are therefore defined by lies...
...and that our consciousness by definition hides....
(Could you imagine any other species whose existence passes into eternity so obliviously?)
[...Which is why our existence feels so fragile...
...with our true 'self' out of reach it sometimes seems the merest breeze could blow us away, so little moors us...
And if it is so – as I suggest below – that we can only know our 'Self' by knowing others'...cut off from them...from our sisters and brothers (of all species)...what do we become if not the very embodiment of "Done-Before-Begun"? ...And that's what we fear most, isn't it?...when we think we fear Death...we fear that we've never lived....See: To Live And Die A Slave, and False Sweetness (Determination 15).]
In Waking Up and in Becoming The Function I make the case that when we're forced to be 'nothing' we're capable of anything...
...able to be turned to whatever Grand Scheme Organized 'Power' (the pitiful-power-drunk-few) wants us to do....
And because we're enmeshed in it, swallowed whole, we don't see the 'Grandest Scheme Of All', that turns the 'all' of humanity...the 'all' of our mystery... away from its larger purposes to the ignoble services of...
...Death-Worship.
One example (among countless counts of complicity, duplicity, corruption and contempt) in my local community paper (the Berkeley Daily Planet) is found in the article: Solar Radiation Management: Dr. Strangelove's Fix For Global Warming – which comments on what podrunks are doing as we speak corrupting our atmosphere in the name of "science" – with devastating side effects. Here's a few they find 'acceptable':
* Drought in Asia and Africa;
* Ozone depletion;
* Increased dangerous ultraviolet radiation;
* The sky is less blue;
* "If discontinued there would be much more rapid warming...";
* Solar power production has decreased;
* Humans and other living things have to breathe the particulate matter they're using (sulfur dioxide, aluminum-oxide dust, "designer self-levitating aerosols");
* Humans and other living things are not getting the direct sunlight we need.
The blue is milky now.
We no longer have brilliant days.
The incessant buzz of the planes plowing the skies...spewing their sprays...
...as if to proclaim a contempt so complete it no longer hides beneath lies...
...its earth-hating, death-deifying ways.
The author, Vivian Warkentin writes: "How dare these ghouls take unilateral command of OUR atmosphere, OUR sky, OUR nature." [The Agriculture Defense Coalition has a petition-drive going.]
["…ever get the feeling that the pitiful-power-drunk-few have decided that there’s nothing we won’t just adjust ourselves to?" (from: Depopulation)]
They are endless, these ignoble insults and rank manipulations...
...not insane, of course, just common, prosaic greed and misanthropy...
...as common as that hand in your back pocket...
...the culmination of the millennia-long war on humanity...
...called class society....
(It must be borne in mind that death-defined designs are only possible if we are bossable...i.e. tamed, i.e. bought, i.e. caught, i.e. stripped of our earth-given gifts.
Watching the mysterious intermission of a gull, floating on the merest breeze,
I wondered...does the pigeon watch this pregnant poise with agony...
...longing to feel such majestic stillness...in the alchemy of balanced energy?
But every living thing has its particular gifts and the comforts from them.
What's most heinous in this manufactured misery the podrunks have made...
...is this disallowance against our own gifts, our claim to what gives us our especial comfort.
[From OTheR Log 82])
We are being denied access to our own gifts...which means our own souls...
...with substitutes...surreptitiously given...
...of podrunk provenance.
We all know this, if only unconsciously...which is why film and etc. so often reveal this reality despite themselves (and often with intention, when there's consciousness behind them)....
In Catwoman – the Halle Berry version – the Sharon Stone character pays a fleet of complicit scientists to create a cosmetic cream that will erase the effects (temporarily) of aging. The down-sides are many...the main one being that aging accelerates when use of the wonder drug (scheme) is discontinued...
...but the 'up-side', for the pitiful-power-drunk-few, is...one: it increases 'profits;' and, two: (the primary purpose), that it makes the power-drunk seem 'indispensable' and we 'dependent'...on them...
...to 'solve' their manufactured problem.
But, beyond this – and far worse, as it's the buried root of our susceptibility to all their ruses – we've been conditioned to feel dependent on them...for our very self-definition....
...They want us to see them as the source of our 'souls'...or...the modern equivalents that are all fraudulent...
...and to not notice they support us like sheetrock across shafts...
There was an ancient one, an ancient redwood – easily twenty paces around – along a heavily-trafficked way I frequent. Recently, when I drove by it was being destroyed. The 'owner' stood there grinning ear-to-ear enjoying the moment with his 'contractor.' My body slowed in horror. I put the window down and asked him, "why are you doing this?"
The owner looked at the contractor and rolled his eyes, circling a finger at his temple as if to say, "these Berkeley-crazies, I swear..."
No one had taught him reverence. The glistening in his eyes was of dollar signs.
The Indian experience with treaties was an experience of betrayal, bad faith, and lies. Those who signed them were called "earth eaters." Russell Means, an Oglala Sioux of Pine Ridge, learned from his grandfather, "I see the white man chop down a tree without a prayer, without a fast, without any kind of reverence. And here the tree can tell him how to live." (Peter Linebaugh, The Magna Carta Manifesto, p. 248)
"And here the tree can tell him how to live."
On the following day three more bodies arrived for dissection. The same public appeared, but this time the atmosphere was less tense, for they knew me and had seen my work. Those present took a more lively interest, made a number of astute and provocative comments, and on certain points the discussion grew quite animated.
After the departure of the SS doctors, several French and Greek doctors paid me a call and asked if I would instruct them in the technique of lumbar punctures. They also requested me to grant them authorization to try the operation on some of the bodies given me, a request I readily granted. I was deeply moved to find that, even inside the barbed wire fences, they continued to manifest such an interest in their profession. They attempted the puncture, and after six or seven tries at last succeeded, then withdrew, quite pleased with their afternoon's work. (Miklos Nyiszli, Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account, p. 35-6)
When you take something alive and make it dead (which is what "commodification" is)...
...and you feed the people on it...("moral superiority," "racial superiority," "intellectual superiority"...["...but they were doing nothing with it...;" "...they should be grateful we give them jobs...;" "...we create 'civilization'..."]).
Enslaving others and raping the earth they excuse in their minds by telling themselves (and everyone else) lies...
What passes for 'souls' when the material out of which they're constructed comes from capital rather than the earth? The Responsibility Of 'The Intellectual' attempts to show that in a system constructed out of lies...truth hides...
...and must be found...by redeveloping the earth-given capability of thinking authentically [for an example see: False Sweetness (Determination 17).]
'Reason'...'Religion'...'Race'...?
Are these materials from which a soul can be made? Or just dirty band-aids...crude attempts to confuse?...
...to stanch our bleeding regret?...prevent us from seeing the dirty deal we never agreed to?...
** Consider the possibility that souls are made of poetry...and that we are all poets....
This means two things...making associations...linguistic / cognitive / mental...that affirm our connections with the earth...and melding musically with the rhythm of the earth.
Without metaphor, therefore – under conditions of unconsciousness – how do we see and therefore know the truth? (i.e., how is it revealed to us?)...
In "metaphor," 'hand' and 'head' are star-blessed lovers...never to be separated... ("To fill a Gap...")
Without metaphor, therefore, how will we feel the longing to follow the mystery where it leads?
'Poetry' is simply surrendering to nature's gravity...exploring our interconnections...
...its death is atomization...
...its chief enemy, then, is...
...capitalism...
It is allegiance to Life itself that must be broken before our allegiance can be shifted to the power-drunk...
...our unconscious complicity must be extracted to elevate podrunk artifacts to the status of 'gods'...
...artifacts derived from what was formerly alive raised up to the level of Lords over us.
We've become dependent on them for our false shine – degrees, awards, titles, promotions, offices...jobs – such that when they're withdrawn and we find ourselves in freefall...
...we're forced to see we're nothing at all...
When we don't exist for ourselves...
...but only to be used...
...this negates our essences, and reduces us to tools...
...clearly unsatisfying...most debilitating...and unvarnished we'd never agree...
...so they give us a cream that gives such a sheen...
...a glow that says "special"...
...a shine called "success"...
...it bestows on us "better-than"...
...and even...
..."the best!"
'Poetry' is simply representing for the inherent unity of all things...that otherwise would be completely suppressed as it threatens 'power.'
And there are infinite ways to express this...
...and there are no rules...
...no judgment....
...To set oneself up as judge is to do the Division work podrunks depend on us to do...
...to reforge the links of the chains that contain us...
...perpetuate the cons...
...pass onward the distress...the dis-ease...the contempt...the hopelessness....
The reality of ranking is so diffuse this fact may serve as unconscious excuse for being unwilling to refuse the Division Work they'll pay us to do.
But the unifying frame of our poetry...of the truth of our inherent freedom...is the consciousness in which it occurs....
...which is the truth of the earth itself...in which truth our consciousness must be rooted...
...else it's turned to the very contempt it seeks to rectify. (The Mr. Smith Virus...("To fill a Gap...")...
When I ask "what else is there?"....
...I'm referring to the choice between life and death, earth and...
...the power-drunk – a no-brainer if we're ever to reclaim our own....
Embracing poetry means renaming yourself...writing your 'self' a new story...(not 'to be seen' but 'to see'...[discussed further at Seeing The Communal Alternative])...
When trained to accept the crude mental pattern "obedience"...
...instead of free to allow complex associations to form...
...ones in which our life is infused...and so goes on beyond us...
...ones in which all is accepted, none refused...
...ones that suspend us in the mystery...out of which our 'name' alchemically bonds...
...when this inheritance is denied...and complexity removed from our eyes...
...and all we see is what 'Power' wants us to be...
...we're capable of any atrocity.
So, brothers and sisters, can we please stop saying, "we need jobs"...? Every time we do we're aligning our interests (unconsciously) with the pitiful-power-drunk-few. We don't need 'jobs'...we need full, vibrant, interesting, fun and reverent lives free of the yoke.
It's time to houseclean our heads, sweep out the conditioning, change the messages, make our own 'stories,' re-name our 'selves.' I've looked "human being" up in the dictionary and there's nothing there about being a slave.
Each person I see is damaged by a system that tells him he's a worker-bee. Imagine what we'll be when we're finally free of that conditioning! [See also: "Becoming The Function"]
It is so past time. This caste system must fall. Not just because it makes no sense at all...but because we're hearing the ancestors' and the earth's (in our bodies) call. Each one of us is an incarnation of an ancestor who died wanting what is within our reach right now.
We're told that how we "get seen" is through "jobs"...how they "get seen" is through "power"...and that "that's just the way it is"...and we mustn't question this arrangement of things.
We used to get seen in cultures that reflected us...(...i.e. made by us...) [See also The Last Civil Rights Movement (Part 2) for further thoughts on this.]...
...and which served us to the degree they served the earth...
When I say "it's beautiful" about the day,
My eyes always go to the skies,
...as if searching for what's real...
...that which makes itself...
...that which is free –
– the truth of the earth...
...what we are inherently.
We think metaphorically because the earth is metaphor....
Life exists in linkages...associations...
So how can we know and see if we don't think metaphorically? And how can we know what's being done to us, going on around us, if we can't perceive Life's poetry? (the truth of the earth – which is us...)
[And this will be elaborated on later...
...but I think it must be said here...
...that when the unconscious sees the dangling "job"...
– offered and withdrawn...
...offered and withdrawn...
– it sees 'life' itself being lobbed about....
...'Life' is what the unconscious believes...
..."the job" means....
...This is the bait podrunks want us to take...
– the worm they want us to bite –
...a disastrous mistake...
...we unconsciously make...
...due to our unconscious association...
...of "the job" with "life"....
...It's what they want us to think...
...the lie that it's they who...
...not just give us our meaning...
...but our very being....
...existence...
...'life'....
...Of course as with everything else...
...in this sick system...
...it's actually 'death'...
...they're rewarding us with...]
(On this issue of controlling us by controlling our unconscious see also (in progress): The 4 Ruses – 2 (Part 2) and The Communal Alternative.)
When the ancestors, the earth, and our fellows speak, it's in the language of metaphor – the mind / the earth make associations that are true, if difficult (i.e. not linear) –
...a facility for which we must reconnect with...
...so we can know we're not alone...
...and move beyond the crippling obsession with the mirror and the megaphone....
And make no mistake, it's not by happenstance we find we're putty in their hands...
...transmogrified from our dreams...
...into their commands...
(And...make no mistake, it's not our fear in that mirror...it's theirs.)
[At some point down the road...
...the great belly of the people will shake with laughter...
...at the joke...
...that we ever obeyed these pitiful folks....]
So this theater-in-the-round called Podrunk-Town...
...with their false-face pasted everyplace...
...is tailor-made to keep us slaves...
...and to keep us from seeing...
...that we (and the earth) are everything....
This podrunk preoccupation with misdirection [of our eyes...turned from the earth to their dearth...and from our dreams to their schemes] was noted in Waking Up, "Capital":
They are shadows, these podrunks, and they know it. They know that they contribute absolutely nothing but theft to the whole dynamic of reproducing our world, day after day, year after piled-on year.
"They are shadows"...and yet they shine falsely...
...and the only way they can continue to 'shine' is if they can force us to be their shadows...
...through force they enforce...
...our complicity...
...which makes for our invisibility...as we fail to see reality – either within or without...
A system that requires that its subjects be ‘nothing,’ blank sheets for capital to write on...
...imposes invisibility on them...
We are robbed of ourselves so the podrunks can train our 'noticing' capacities on their false face...on 'Power' in its various guises (bosses, masters, parents, paid henchmen who represent them)...
...so that we can anticipate what 'it' needs in order to become the very embodiment of the need they want fulfilled...
...we do this to become a more marketable commodity...
...but being a commodity necessarily means that our true selves are never seen...
...(not even by ourselves)...
...and so we drag this need – this dead carcass of our unfed, unseen souls – our whole life long...
...demanding of others that they see us...while we see nothing around us...
But if true reality is Fellow Feeling – knowing ourselves by knowing our brothers and sisters – it's daily denial means the absence of meaning...and chronic invisibility...
...cut off from ourselves we're lost and unknown...
..."not-seeing" means "unseen"...
With our eyes locked on the "little ways" of 'masters' (the various faces of 'Power'), devoting our lives to the study of 'Life' is no longer possible.
When we turn our nature-given gifts, our human spirit and intelligence (our mystery...which we should be using to enlarge the realm of the possible)...over to them to be pounded into the shapes they make for us to validate (fit into)...
...to a degree our gifts may deflate to mere vanity...
...and like fantasies...
...or dribble off into denial...
...or day-to-day trials of simple survival...
...but even on our knees we still see deeper reality...
...that effervescently refuses to be completely deluged...
...and as repression unrelieved means insanity...
...podrunks seize artifacts of human creativity...pound them into acceptable packages...and allow approach from only pre-approved routes – with sentry stations and guard towers along the way...
...and as creatures of illusion we imagine this herding to be of our making....
And then pave the way for our children to follow....
And if they venture off the path we drive them back in...
...and we tell them and ourselves this is...love.
...when what this is really...is: packaging our children for ease of use by those who abuse us.
(From OTheR Log 83.)
If anyone's out there I'm certain you've seen that my latest offerings are all on this theme of our invisibility...
I don't think it's just because it's in my mind, this omnipresent theme, that it seems to stand behind these words of Adam Bede:
"...it seems to me it's the same with love and happiness as with sorrow – the more we know of it the better we can feel what other people's lives are or might be, and so we shall only be more tender to 'em, and wishful to help 'em. The more knowledge a man has, the better he'll do's work; and feeling's a sort o' knowledge."
As I read them, when I got to: "– the more...we can feel what other people's lives are or might be..."
...in my mind I heard next: "...the more we know ourselves."
Looking over the scattered bits I've been adding to unfinished blogs...blogs I've been trying to finish for like-forever...
...the following formula – in one form or another – kept popping up:
Force + Duplicity = Complicity = Invisibility (The False Face...a.k.a. The Commodity)
(From: False Sweetness (Determination 15).)
So I've decided to try to put some flesh on this formula...to make it more fluid so you don't have to intuit it. [See: The Last Civil Rights Movement (Part 2).]
We know our 'self' by knowing others'...cut off from them...from our sisters and brothers...what do we become but the very embodiment of 'Done-Before-Begun'?
(Both: Unmasking Complicity's False Sweetness [Determination 12] and OTheR Log 76 look at the question: how to choose "freedom before comfort"?
I.e., Perhaps the question has to be posed differently...perhaps it's that feeling of "being special" that is the 'comfort' we seek...salving the need we leave our families with...that stems from not being seen? – perhaps it's that to which we're attached?...
...to accept being ruled not with the anticipation of ruling seducing us...
...but the eyes of others upon us....
A system that imposes invisibility, the requirement that its subjects be ‘nothing,’ blank sheets for capital to write on...
[See The Two Winds (Pt. 8): "We are all united in being nothing."]
... must provide outlets for them to feel distinct....
...So, on the one hand, these outlets are how we advocate for ourselves (and are ‘self-created’ within the parameters capital allows *), pronounce our ‘identity,’ ‘uniqueness,’ announce that we exist...
...on the other hand, these outlets are the pre-approved routes used to capture dissent and manage it.
But the reality, the truth, is that we are not self-determinative. We are subjects. Vassals. Slaves...
...All of us...Across all the false divisions (people-created, but State-approved.)
In the case of ‘Race,’ this means a social hierarchy with some on top of others.
In the case of ‘Religion,’ this means a moral hierarchy with some on top of others.
In the case of ‘Reason,’ this means a political hierarchy with some on top of others.
In the case of ‘Recognition,’ this means an economic hierarchy with some on top of others.
Of course they're all political at root because all reinforce hierarchy and Division.
The point of Division is hierarchy and the point of hierarchy is Division.
And they're all economic at root because no one is really 'seen.'
So...
...what can we do then, with all these ruses?
I wrote Waking Up to answer that question, to say that all the Ruses – all the Cons – are interlinked through wage work – our stolen lives – and that we must...take our lives back.
The Ruses ameliorate the distress, compensate for our stolen lives, and world.
That the vast majority are denied the compensation of 'Recognition' only reinforces it –
...for those to whom it's given...
...and for those to whom it's denied.
Complicity's both the penalty and the reward.
[...to be continued.]
['Force' makes us fear what lies without...'Duplicity'...what lies within....So that "perfect circle of control" is actually a perfect circle of Fear.]
* i.e., individual, not communal...and certainly not capable of mobilizing masses to an alternative (to capital) identity.
© Nas2EndWork (the NEW)